This invention is related to a technique for monitoring the exposure of selected publications to readers and, more particularly, to an accurate, reliable electronic technique for determining when the publication (e.g. a magazine) is open and an individual who has been selected as a test subject is positioned close enough to it so that he is likely to be reading it.
Various techniques are now in use to determine the readership of selected publications. Such publications are typically magazines. The term "magazine" will be used hereinafter to include any type of publication typified by a magazine. Publishers and advertisers require this information in order to determine readership which, in turn, is useful to set printing runs, establish advertising rates, indicate geographic areas for concentrating resources, provide an analysis of economic and social categories of the readership, and the like.
To currently obtain this information, such surveys are conducted primarily in one of two ways. Firstly, individuals are contacted personally or by phone and interviewed as to their magazine preferences. However, this method is inaccurate because it relies on memory recall of the individuals which has been shown as being suspect and insufficiently accurate. Moreover, once the interviewer reveals the magazine in which he is interested, the selected individual being interviewed may develop a subjective inclination in favor of that magazine which may not in fact be true.
The second approach involves collecting a number of volunteer or paid individuals who are expected to keep a diary of their reading habits. The diaries are then retrieved periodically from the individuals, and the entries are analyzed. However, this approach relies exclusively on the accurate and complete record keeping on the part of the particular individuals involved. Unfortunately, this also tends to be unreliable because people occasionally forget to make entries, they may be distracted from doing it, or, occasionally, may simply not be inclined to make an entry. Therefore, the techniques conventionally used up to the present time suffer from serious disadvantages which have caused concern about the accuracy and, therefore, the underlying value of such surveys.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,659,314 was issued Apr. 21, 1987 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,726,771. which is a CIP thereof, was issued Feb. 23, 1988. Both patents were issued to the present inventor and were aimed at overcoming the shortcomings of the above-discussed approaches, and these patents are incorporated by reference herein. The approach disclosed therein can be summarized as follows with relation to FIG. 1 which has been copied here from U.S. Pat. No. 4,726,771 for the sake of convenience. To conduct the survey, persons are selected by the surveying organization based on certain criteria. These criteria can be, for example, age, income, geographic location, sex, and level of education. The publisher and/or advertisers of the magazine may require an analysis of their readership which is broken down into one or more of these categories. The individuals who are approached to be test subjects are merely asked to participate in a test the details of which are not explained. Each person is told only that a requirement of the test is the wearing of a certain article of clothing. Additional information is preferably not supplied in order to avoid predisposing or prejudicing the individual test subject toward or away from the aims of the survey. For example, if the individual were to be told that the survey relates to magazines, then this might result in more attention being paid to perusing magazines than would be normal for that person. Even worse would be the situation were the individual told the particular magazine involved in the survey. In order to avoid this problem, each individual is given a conventional article of clothing, and is simply asked to wear it on a regular basis. For example, such an article of clothing might be a watch for men and a bracelet for women.
As depicted in FIG. 1, a transmitter unit 10 and a receiver unit 20 cooperate to provide information relating to the readership of a designated magazine by individuals who are selected to be test subjects. The transmitter unit 10 is preferably constructed in the form of a flat, ultra-thin, card-sized insert for the magazine. Various types of inserts have long been commonly placed in magazine copies to advertise such products as perfume or to provide a convenient mailing postcard for a particular purpose. Such a card is typically stapled into or adhesively secured to a page inside the magazine copy. In this manner, the transmitter unit is camouflaged so that it provides no indication to the reader of its true purpose. In fact, to enhance its camouflage it might even be printed with some type of advertisement or provided with a perfume-saturated sealed flap.
Internally, the "card" includes a battery 15 which powers transmitter 17. Battery 15 must, of course, be of the flat type with dimensions which, for example, are those of a battery currently available as part of a Polaroid film pack. Transmitter 17 can emit an analog or a digital magazine identification signal via antenna 19. This signal is set so that it utilizes a code that is unique to that particular magazine. Thus, Time magazine is assigned a signal code and Newsweek is assigned a different one. A transmitter 17 can be a microchip which is sized to be small enough and flat enough to be accommodated in the "card". In the preferred embodiment, transmitter 17 is digital and generates a particular digital code. Such transmitters are conventional and well known. Clothing tags in department stores currently contain such transmitter chips as part of an anti-theft system. As such, no further details of its circuitry and configuration is deemed necessary. Antenna 19 is a miniature wire which, however, is sufficiently effective to emit the desired signal for the necessary distance, as discussed below.
A receiver unit 20 is accommodated in the above-mentioned article of clothing such as a watch or bracelet. It serves some useful or decorative function for its wearer so that the particular individual is unaware of its significance as far as the conduct of a survey is concerned. A watch is ideal for this purpose because a timing circuit is required anyway for the desired operation of the circuitry, as explained below.
Receiver unit 20 includes a receiving antenna 21 connected to a receiver 23. Receiver 23 is a circuit which serves to distinguish the signal emitted by transmitter 17 from other signals which may be picked up by antenna 21. If transmitter 17 is analog in nature, then receiver 23 would be a filter responsive to a very narrow range of frequencies. However, in the preferred digital embodiment, receiver 23 is a logic circuit which responds only to the particular code emitted by transmitter 17. Such circuitry is conventional and well known. As such, no specific circuit details are deemed necessary.
When receiver 23 detects a signal corresponding to that emitted by transmitter 17, it sends a control signal to timer 25. Timer 25 is, in turn, connected to memory 27. When receiver 23 initially detects the signal from transmitter 17 which identifies a particular magazine, its control signal causes timer 25 to store in an address location of memory 27 the exact time when the identification signal was first detected. When the identification signal is no longer picked up by receiver 23, timer 25 is controlled to store in the next address location of memory 27 the exact time when that signal loss occurred. Thus, by subtracting the first time stored in the memory from the second time stored in the memory, a "reading period" is obtained. Each such reading period is representative not only of the exposure of the magazine to the reader but also of a "reading occurrence". An analysis can then be made of how many times the individual test subject picked up the magazine (i.e. how many reading occurrences) and, also, the length of time the magazine was read by that individual for each occurrence.
In an alternative embodiment, receiver 23 is connected directly to memory 27 via line 29 shown in broken lines. The control signal over line 29 from receiver 23 would be effective to store an occurrence signal in specially assigned address locations of memory 27. Thus, memory 27 would have one set of addresses dedicated to "occurrences" and another set of address locations dedicated to "reading periods".
The information content of a memory 27 is retrieved from it by terminal 31. It should be understood that terminal 31 is normally not coupled to memory 27 which is housed in the above-mentioned article of clothing. Terminal 31 is a remote unit which is coupled to the article of clothing by suitable plugs after it has been retrieved by the surveying organization from the individual test subject. A suitable plug is inserted into the watch, say, and the stored information is caused to be transferred from memory 27 to terminal 31. Terminal 31 can be another form of memory, a hard copy unit such as a printer, and/or a video display device.
A key feature of the technique disclosed in these patents is the requirement that the magazine identification signal emitted by transmitter 17 be detected by receiver 23 only when the magazine is within approximately one foot of the article of clothing containing receiver unit 20. This is accomplished by suitably adjusting the relationship between the transmitter power and the receiver sensitivity. The transmitter power can, for example, be reduced so as to be effective with a conventional receiver only up to the mentioned distance. On the other hand, the sensitivity of receiver 23 can likewise be adjusted so that it is low enough in comparison with what is emitted by a particular transmitter to detect signals only within the above-mentioned distance.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,726,771 discloses a number of embodiments of switch 16 that are used to trigger transmitter 17 when the magazine is opened to the place where the card has been inserted.
Although the just-described approach effectively overcomes the above-discussed shortcomings of prior art approaches, it has not completely solved the problem of providing the advertisers with satisfactory results. Some room for improvement exists because transmitter 17 can be triggered to emit its signal, thereby indicating that the magazine has been read, even though this may not really be so in actuality. For example, the test subject may have merely fanned the magazine. This certainly does not constitute the type of reading which the advertiser would regard as being meaningful because the advertisement of interest, at which the card has been placed, almost certainly would not have been read during a manipulation of the magazine in such a perfunctory manner. Also, the card might have been triggered even though only a very few of its pages were actually looked at attentively if by coincidence the card happened to be inserted into the magazine at, or on, one of them. If the information being sought involves readership of the magazine, then merely reading a few of its pages would not qualify, and yet the apparatus of U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,659,314 and 4,726,771 would indicate that the magazine was read. Consequently, the results attained with this technique leave something to be desired.
In addition, it has been explained above that U.S. Pat. No. 4,659,314 utilizes a timer 25 to provide a time duration for the magazine having been read. This is significant information to avoid the possibility of recording the triggering of transmitter 17 as an "occurrence" when the magazine was merely fanned or with only the reading of a few pages. However, storing time information requires memory space that can be quite considerable when many instances of magazine readership are recorded, and when the memory space is perhaps shared with other information for monitoring of advertising of another sort.